The Age of Decadence

The Age of Decadence is a turn-based, hardcore role-playing game set in a low magic, post-apocalyptic fantasy world. The game features a detailed skill-based character system, multiple skill-based ways to handle quests, choices & consequences, and extensive dialogue trees.

As you probably know, our next game is a sci-fi RPG inspired by Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky (a generation ship novel). The overall design will be similar to that of The Age of Decadence and follow the same principles:

Turn-Based combat with action points and different attack types based on tradeoffs.

Skill-Based character system.

Class-based systems offer you different packages of skills and abilities, designed to ensure that no man is left behind and your rogue can kick as much ass as your fighter. It’s a good, time-honored design that makes it very hard to make mistakes. In comparison, skill-based systems offer all the freedom you can handle and don’t restrict you in any way, so the chances of you screwing up your character is fairly high, especially for the first time players.

Neither system is better by default so it comes down to personal preferences and firmly held beliefs, which is where it gets a bit complicated. Some folks believe that games shouldn't allow the player to make bad builds and choices; anything else is bad design. I think that if every decision is awesome, it hardly matters what you choose. Making mistakes is part of the learning experience but not everyone has the patience for it.

Stats & Skills Matter not only in combat where they provide various bonuses but outside of combat as well, when exploring or dealing with people. It’s a deceptively simple aspect, so let’s examine it in details.

What it means in practical terms is that your character would succeed in areas where his/her stats and skills are strong but fail where they are weak. For example, a perceptive person would notice something others won’t; a brute would be able to move a heavy object, etc.

Obviously, the effect can be minor (i.e. you moved a boulder and found a couple of coins underneath it!), major (you moved a boulder and found a passageway to another area!), or anything in between (you moved a boulder and found a passageway to another area where you found … a couple of coins! T’was a good day for adventuring).

Usually, stats and skills are checked in the following situations:

Multiple solutions (i.e. different ways to arrive to the same destination, everyone’s happy and nobody’s upset)

Multiple solutions are an important gameplay element, which allows you to go through a game in a manner fitting your character, but it is the optional content that truly differentiates one playthrough from another and boosts replayability (because solving the same problems in different ways isn’t enough).

Naturally, optional content must differ in accessibility. Someone’s old shed should be easy to break into (let’s say everyone with a single point in lockpick, which is 80% of all players). An area that resisted all attempts to get into for decades or centuries like the Abyss should force most people to turn back to preserve the setting’s integrity (let’s say only 10% of players should be able to explore it). The rest of the content would fall somewhere in between.

This approach greatly upset some players who felt that they were punished “just because they chose the ‘wrong’ stats”. Some RPG players are notoriously obsessive-compulsive and won’t rest until they create a character that can get the maximum amount of content, which does require reading online guides and meta-gaming like there’s no tomorrow – the fastest way to kill all enjoyment and ruin the game. Of course, the counter-argument is that failing repeatedly (considering how easy it is to make a character ill-equipped for what you're trying to do) is an equally fast way to kill the enjoyment.

I’m not sure there’s a way to “fix it” as those who want to get maximum content in a single playthrough will continue to metagame no matter what. The moment you tell the player "sorry, buddy, you need to be this tall to ride this", some players won't accept the failure and would want to know this kind of info in advance. Not many people see it as "you win some, you lose some" design. Anyway, I'd love to read your thoughts on this matter.

Non-Combat ways through the game

While combat should always be the main pillar of RPGs, allowing the player to avoid combat and progress in different ways opens up more role-playing and story-telling opportunities. Also it makes killing your way through the game YOUR choice rather than the only thing to do.

AoD allowed you to talk your way through and in the CSG we’ll add a stealth path through the game. Here is what it means design wise:

Combat should be avoidable in most cases. Enemies shouldn’t turn hostile on sight, which means that filler combat is out, which in turn makes the game much shorter. Populating a map with “enemies” is easy. Providing paths to sneak past and writing fitting intros and dialogues with logical speech checks (you can’t just ask them nicely and passionately to let you through) for each encounter, as well as reasons for them to be there in the first place isn’t. It’s also very time-consuming and heavy on scripting, which is always an issue for a small team.

Even playing Pillars of Eternity I was surprised how much filler combat the game had and wondered if cutting it out wouldn’t have boosted the game’s replayability as I’d rather play a shorter game several times to explore different options than run through an endless bog of generic encounters that serve absolutely no real purpose.

Keep in mind that combat is an active gamepay aspect – basically, its own game with its own rules and complex mechanics. Dialogues are a passive aspect. You choose a line, click and see what happens. Unless dialogues are the main and only gameplay element, it will always be inferior to combat on a system level, much like no RPG has managed to offer a stealth system that rivals that of Thief.

Thus the talking and sneaking paths will be much shorter by default but the assumption is that it’s part of the meal not the meal itself, i.e. the full experience will require several different replays, combat AND non-combat, which brings us to the next item: replayability.

Non-Linear & Replayable

First let’s define what it means. Linear design is easy to understand: you move from A to B to C, always in this order, which takes away the freedom of choice completely. Then we have the “Bioware design”: do 4 locations in any order, which as an illusion of choices, much like dialogues where you get to say the same thing in 4 different ways.

True non-linearity requires two things:

Multiple ways leading toward the endgame location (i.e. branching questlines), so you never have to travel the same path if you replay the game

Very few “required” story-telling nodes (locations, conversation, events) the player simply must visit or trigger in order to progress.

The positives are clear. Now let’s take a look at the negatives:

The game will be short because you’re taking all available content and splitting it between multiple paths and filter it down via mutually exclusive decisions. AoD has over 110 quests, which is a lot, but you get no more than 20-25 per playtrhough and that’s if you leave no stone unturned.

Overall, I believe that it’s about finding the right balance, which is always the case with all sufficient complex systems and issues. Your feedback is critical, provided it fits our design core, so regardless of whether or not you agree or disagree with my take on these aspects, feel free to share your thoughts.

The Age of Decadence

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Choose your own adventure like design fun, but leads to some frustration.

For most of act 1 I've liked the transitions and most of the encounters have made sense. But after making it to the desert city I've run into some situations where how my character's positioning is handled simply breaks all immersion.
I took a job to he...

A guide to character creation and the basic mechanics of the Age of Decadence. Marvel while learning how to hit chance is calculated! Gape in wonderment at an explanation of critical strike! Astound your friends and family with tales of one of the most rep...

This Guide covers the optional unmarked Side Quests scattered throughout Teron, along with a list of skills needed to unlock them or give you a tactical edge in a fight.
This Guide also provides a map that notes all the points of interest in Teron.
N...

This guide is intended for new players who want a concrete example of how to create an extremely effective hybrid character that can talk, fight, explore all the lore, and access all endings.
It describes one specific path through the beginning of Ter...

I really liked the setting as well as the history, however the way that missions were consistently removed from my reach because of decisions I had made without any forewarning ruined it for me. I felt like I was floundering through the game with no real control over my destiny, I tried to resolve this issue by save scumming, so I would go back and try different paths if I realised that one was cut off, but ultimately that just made the game tedious. In fact, I found myself saving before every encounter or conversation as well, because the consequences for actions within a single conversation or encounter weren’t always clear from the outset, which was frustrating. Sometimes it felt like this disconnect between my decisions and the consequences was because there was cut content, but that might just be a feeling. An example of this is, I decided to allow Cassius the Lore master live and I took him to serve the local Warlord. Now, Cassius is an expert in metallurgy with an interest in the old knowledge of blue steel, which is a very valuable metal in the game. I help the local ambitious warlord gain control of an old blue steel mine. I even bring the ancient machinery in the mine back to life so that it can create blue steel. I go back to the Warlord and get a couple of coins and that’s the end of that. I never hear of it ever again. Nothing of note happens apart from I annoy one of his enemies. In fact, in the epilogue it says that Cassius was useless to the local warlord and achieved nothing of note and that the local Warlord basically failed at being a Warlord. It doesn’t even mention that he’s army had access to top tier armour and weapons. These consequences don’t match the information I was presented with and this disconnect happens throughout the game.

I think that the game is probably best played as a rollercoaster where you pick your path at the beginning and just go with it, allowing things to happen around you. Though you might still have problems with the skill checks which can add their own level of tedium, as knowing which skills you will need to do well isn’t always intuitive and failing skill checks can mean that you miss out on content.

If Steam had a neutral thumb gesture I would have clicked on that. The tedium is almost offset by the cool world.

I played through this game 2-3 times (offline, did not register as "hours on record") and it has an interesting enough story, but it is absolutely broken from a gameplay-design standpoint. You MUST cheat to actually progress the story, so it is a complete waste of time. The creators clearly miscalculated what it should take to move things along when they initially wrote the game and are too disinterested to go back through and fix it.

You MUST cheat no matter how your character is specced. If you do not cheat then you will search high and low for a door through which your type of character can progress the story and find that there simply is not one. You will start over fresh and try a different type of charater only to encounter a different brick wall through. I have seen the responses to critical posts that try to defend the game by stating "it's supposed to be hard and high-stakes and you have to specialize to finish the game. You just aren't used to it because modern games let you max out all skills and 100% the game with a single character." This is a smokescreen. This is misdirection to persuade potential buyers to ignore the criticism and buy it anyway.

Functionally-speaking, the game is divided into separate chapters or acts like Diablo 2 and presented to you as locations or towns that you travel to and perform quests when you arrive. The problem is that you can not actually complete the quests that you are assigned. If you specialize your class, stats, and skills to be someone that does not engage in combat, you will not be able to progress the story because you'll be forced to walk down a particular path where you will always get attacked and there is no opportunity to talk or bribe your way out of it. If you specialize in a combat character you will find that you will be unable to progress past a step on a quest where you must recruit this guy or persuade that guy. When you try a balanced character you will be unable to progress past either of those steps.

However, you can unlock the next town long before you actually finish the quests for the chapter that you're stuck on. Just go on to the next town and do some stuff to get your specs, stats, and gear boosted then backtrack and finish the quests so you can progress the story, right? WRONG. As soon as you leave it auto-completes nearly every quest you had at that town. When you go back and talk to the NPC's they're talking at you referencing things that you did and you have no idea what they're talking about. They are referencing the later steps of the quests that you were unable to complete beacuse you got stuck! It doesn't make any sense. You're praised for deciding things a certain way when you were never even presented with that decision.

Imagine playing Diablo 2 and you reach the end of the second to last act and just have to beat the boss that guards the path to hell. The door to the boss room is locked and you have three options to get in the room, all of which is impossible if you are specced in any of the ways that would have allowed you to get to this point in the game. You decide to just go to the last act and complete some minor side quests in hell to spec up. You return to the 2nd to last act so that you can defeat the boss that blocks the path to the last act. When you arrive at the 2nd to last act everyone is complimenting how you defeated the boss behind the door that you were never able to get through.

It's even worse that only certain cities on the map will trigger this automatic quest-finish thing and there is little indication ahead of time which locations are safe and which ones will break all your quests. Since this problem denies you the quest rewards that you need to level up your character, this only breaks the game more and more because you seem to be falling further and further behind the spec requirements that the game assumes that you have once you reach a certain point in the storyline.

How much do i lose for changing sides? Will HA compensate me that with some quests or anything like training? Just thinking about differences i will have when thinking about Skill points. We should get something, i know betrayals can end bad but you know...

Sorry for asking a lot.
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